8 Reports Your Business Teams Should Receive Every Week

Your business teams have a lot to do. Keeping track of everything they need to review can be a challenge — and one which takes a bit of technical assistance to handle well. Smart contract management software can automatically generate all of the reports you need to keep your business running smoothly. Here are some examples of reports that should be reviewed on (at least) a weekly basis to help your business manage contracts online.

1. Active Contracts

It might seem really simple, but just having a list of the contracts your company has active (sorted by type) can be a lifesaver. Knowing exactly what your company has on its plate is also useful for your legal team, who can keep an eye on things that might end up being an issue in the future. This report can be broken down further based on different stages of the contract management cycle. For example, your legal team may care more about contracts in the negotiation stage. But your AR team may care more about fully executed contracts with an in-progress term of service.

Additionally, some companies (or government departments) need to have this list available. Posting contracts publicly may be a compliance requirement, at least in some states. For example, the state of Washington requires annual reporting of contracts by all state agencies and institutions of higher education. Although you don’t need to do this every week for compliance, it’s a good idea to run the report regularly.

2. Late Payments

Whether the payment is going out or coming in, it’s important to spot a late payment right away. The appropriate people can then be encouraged to get the payment out (or in) before it affects your cash flow or your reputation. The fact is that payments sometimes get forgotten, and it’s necessary to make sure that they are tracked down. A weekly report highlighting any late payments is an excellent way to do this, and enterprise contract management software can make it happen..

3. SLA Violation Risks

For IT contract management, tracking downtime that approaches a service level agreement violation is key. When IT directors have forewarning, they can direct resources to the problem system or contract before it’s too late. Violating an SLA can cost you a vendor contract. Also, it can result in a major hit to your reputation. So, it’s better to stave off these problems before they reach the violation point. Sometimes there is a good explanation for the downtime, and sometimes there’s an invisible problem. No matter the cause, your teams can now address it.

4. Status of High-Risk Contracts

Some contracts simply carry more risk than others. This applies to both customer contract and vendor contract management. It might be that the contract is particularly large. Or it could be a government contract you simply can’t afford to lose. The first step to generating this hand report is to create and use a KPI-based contract scoring system. Then, you can train your software to identify high-risk contracts.

Weekly reports should contain the following pieces of information:

• The status of all contracts you consider to be high-risk
• Their contract scores
• Where they are in the procurement or fulfillment process
• When they expire
• Who is responsible for the required tasks

This allows you to quickly spot if a high-risk contract is in danger of becoming a, well, non-existent contract.

5. Performance Reports

Reports should be generated that show which contracts are assigned to which departments and employees. This allows for the thorough tracking of performance metrics over time. The business team should be able to quickly spot problems such as:

• An employee falling behind (Are they overloaded? Is there a problem?)
• Potential compliance issues that indicate the need for more training
• Projects that are starting to go over time, budget, or both 

The right managers and team leads can then fix the problems before they become serious issues. Such reports can also help project managers route tasks to employees who are being underutilized and give breathing space to anyone who might be overwhelmed. Manual or randomized task assignment is inefficient, but enterprise contract management software can make your team more productive.

6. Critical Milestones

Another weekly report that will make your business stronger is a critical milestone report. This tells you which contracts are coming up on expiry or milestones that may need extra attention. By checking the report, you can see these milestones coming well in advance and create a strong renewal plan. You can also set email reminders of milestones. But checking the report can help you be sure that nothing was missed. Emails, after all, have been known to go astray.

Generating this report can help you allocate resources. It can also guide your scheduling during critical periods, such as the last weeks of the quarter or during your busy season.

7. Overdue Workflows

Checking for overdue workflows can also help with performance. A timeline report can tell you right away if there is a contract or workflow that needs extra resources to bring it back onto schedule. It can also let you know where delays occur most often. Overdue workflows happen. But if your employees don’t catch them quickly, they can easily become missed deadlines that can result in lost sales or customers.

Users can also cross-reference this information with the performance reports. These two data sets will help you continue to optimize and improve your protocols for assigning workflows. This is even more essential for complicated parallel workflows that may involve multiple users or even multiple departments.

8. New and Completed Contracts

Finally, although many contracts are ongoing, some may be completed. A report that shows how many contracts have expired or have been fulfilled can help sales teams. With this information, they know what their targets should be for new contracts for the coming weeks. In contrast, a report of new contracts will help determine whether sales goals are being met. This overview can also help business teams see what direction the “winds” are blowing in terms of the contract types that are coming in. This is useful information for marketing as well as contract management.ContraxAware’s smart contract management software can generate all of these reports. Even better, the contract tracking software can generate reports as grids, lists, charts, or timelines. The software has full capabilities to search, filter, group, and sort contract data. That means that the right information can be located without people feeling overloaded or confused. If you want to start using more data to inform your business practices, schedule a 1:1 demo to see our software in action.